Polished Raised Metal Styled Vector Text Using Illustrator

[ilovegraphics]

In this tutorial, you will learn how to create text elements in illustrator that look like they are polished raised metal. Using this technique, you can actually turn any boring title in your brochure prints, booklet print covers, or your website's headings into polished looking steel text. This will require previous experience working with Illustrator, but if you stick to these steps, you will see how easy it is to do.

1. Create a new document for your title. Make sure you set the resolution and the size to the specifications that you need. For printed titles, it would be wise to use CMYK colour and of course at least 300 ppi for your resolution.



2. Now, once you have a new document open, use a rectangle as your background base. Choose the colour of course that will best contrast or blend with the raised polished style you are making.



3. Now, type in your text. Use the appropriate font style for your own design.



4. Notice that depending on your default choices, your font will have a certain colour and stroke with it. It is these properties that we will easily tweak to get the raised polished effect that we want. For now, remove these properties by selecting no colour for the fill and the stroke.



5. So first, with the text selected, go to the appearance panel and click on its menu from the top right of the controls. Click on Add Fill.



6. To create a polished silver like look, add a white and grey gradient. Use a right angle 90 degrees or negative 90 degrees so that the gradient is balanced on the horizontal. This adds our first effect layer.



7. Next we will add the raised buff effect. Add a new fill layer in the appearance panel. Make sure this new fill layer is beneath our initial gradient layer. Use a white fill colour in this layer and then select Effect - Path - Offset Path. Adjust the offset to 1 pixel.



8. Then go to Effect - Distort and Transform and then add 1 pixel value to the vertical move option.



9. Next we add a black contour. Add a new fill layer again. Use a black fill colour. Adjust it again by using the transform effect feature. Use a 3 pixel value in the vertical move.



10. Then, duplicate this black contour layer, and then add a dark grey to grey gradient to it.



11. Now, this layer will be our raised or embossed effect. Use the transform effect on this again. This time, use a 1 pixel vertical move value and a .25 horizontal move value. Then add additional copy values to it. Use 8-10 depending on how "raised" you want your text to be.



12. Finally, we will add a shadow effect to our raised text. Simply select our last gradient layer and then add a drop shadow effect by going to Effect - Stylize - Drop shadow. Change the values a bit to make sure that your shadow is visible a bit below our embossed text.



13. Once done, you should have our nice polished metal text effect for your specialized titles. Congratulations!